Vancouver poet Kayla Czaga’s first trade poetry collection is For Your Safety Please Hold On(Nightwood Editions, 2014), a book
constructed out of a series of dark, lyric vignettes of small town living, fear
of what lives in the darkness of humanity, and the relief of surviving the
worst of it, as well as being able to recognize the many shades of beauty and
dark humour. A series of short lyric twists in five sections—“Mother &
Father,” “The Family,” “For Play,” “For Your Safety Please Hold On” and “Many
Metaphorical Birds”—her rough lyrics evoke a history of small town brutalities,
approached as a series of open and honest explorations into family, sexuality,
gender issues and violence, and yet, never allow themselves to lapse into pessimism.
Her poems explore circumstances, possibilities and a series of questions, as
well as allegations, accusations and what otherwise might not have been discussed
in polite company. In lyrically-packed poems about drunk uncles, youthful
violence and what terrible things girls do to other girls, this is a poetry
collection that explores a series of very specific stories. Not that this is
simply a matter-of-fact collection; I might even call it optimistic. The narrator
of For Your Safety Please Hold On,
one might suspect, managed to “hold on” through a series of experiences, some
of which might not have seemed as traumatic until much later, and not only
survive, but thrive.

A
FEW BOYS, JULY 1997

a few boys set fire to their shorts,few threw sticks for big black dogs, one rode
his wheelchair to the Kit-Kat store, a few disturbed shit, a few had it coming,
some jerks and some nice young boys, a few flirted, one helped his girl into a
tree, a few caught fire, jumped over sprinklers, a few rode scooters, fewer
drove cars, a few listened to rude music at the gym and were asked to turn it
down but they didn’t, so a few were followed and shot down by the creek—three killed,
a few photos on the evening news even though it was only a small-town crime,
only a few boys—a few were just a shame, a few still pedalled blue bicycles, a
few stopped at the half-mast flag and felt ashamed, and went on collecting
frogs

Given
the poems that make up Czaga’s debut, one might suspect that Nightwood editor
and publisher Silas White has a more than ongoing interest in the rough and
complicated coming-of-age lyric of small-town British Columbia, given how this
collection is reminiscent of, say, Vancouver poet andrea bennett’s first trade
poetry collection, Canoodlers (Gibsons
BC: Nightwood Editions, 2014) [see my review of such here], or even some of
Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky’s early work, notably her Home of Sudden Service (Gibsons BC:
Nightwood Editions, 2006). The poems that really strike in Czaga’s For Your Safety Please Hold On are some
of the ones in the third section, “For Play,” which do exactly what she
suggests, playing with the line and metre and song of the lyric, utilizing
similar kinds of darker stories that run through the collection as a whole, but
musically jagged, bouncing and articulate in ways that really need to be heard
aloud, such as the second section of the poem “Gertrude Stein Loves A Girl,” “two—a
two of girls,” that reads: